I was always going to have a soft spot for the retro horror pastiche The House of the Devil. After all, the schlocky slashers that it references and mimics with casual flair are the films I grew up on; tales of feisty babysitters cast adrift amid suburban satanic cults, involving long, slow build-ups interspersed with brief bouts of insane blood-spattering violence. It helps that director Ti West appears to be both a fan and a film-maker – which is more than can be said of the dunderheads behind the string of 70s and 80s slasher reboots that have recently troubled our multiplexes. While the (re)makers of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and its ilk have churned out lobotomised jittery trash for the Twitter generation, The House of the Devil is so lovingly old-fashioned in its pacing that viewers under 40 may well start to wonder when the hell anything is going to happen. But happen it does, in joyously unruly fashion, with the aid of crash-zooms, freeze-frame credits (in sickly yellow font!) and a skin-crawlingly appropriate synth-rock score.

It helps that leading lady Jocelin Donahue looks a bit like Jessica Harper with the ghost of Argento lurking at her elbow. And that Tom Noonan seems to be playing a cross between Angus Scrimm's Tall Man from Phantasm and horny Ernest Borgnine in The Devil's Rain. But beyond the checklist of references (Halloween, Rosemary's Baby, To the Devil a Daughter, etc) there's a real disciplined pleasure in West's sardonic nostalgia which was lacking from Tarantino's comparable Grindhouse project.

In one particularly delightful scene from The House of the Devil, our heroine attempts to alleviate her anxieties by dancing around the eponymous abode with a clunky Walkman (remember them?) strapped heftily to her waist – a moment that just wouldn't have worked with an MP3 player. As for the film itself, a limited number of equally unwieldy VHS copies have been made available to trigger drool responses in those old farts (like me) who fought in the "video nasty" wars of the 80s, and are still outraged at just how hard it is to buy "a video recorder" nowadays. I tried it in Currys just last week. "I'd like to buy a new VCR," I said to the 12-year-old behind the counter, who looked at me with blank disbelief. After consulting his manager, he directed me to the back of the store where lay a dusty DVD player which, at a push, had the facility to operate such obsolete technologies as VHS "video cassettes". But when I asked the child if it would also do Betamax, I was told to leave the shop and "go to a car boot sale".

Yet I am not alone. Just as the advent of CDs has fostered a growing army of diehard vinyl lovers, so the tactile pleasure of the video cassette still holds many in its thrall. What's the attraction? Well, for one thing the sheer physicality of the videotape experience. None of this precious "load disc while making sure to avoid touching the surface for fear of fingerprints" baloney – with a video, you had to slam the thing into the machine, often with both fists (particularly in the case of "top loaders", which resembled fork-lift trucks in their heavy-duty mechanical crankage). You remember that scene from Videodrome where James Woods has sex with his television after thrusting a pulsatingly fleshy (and surely illegal) tape into his VCR? Would it have had the same effect if Woods had spent 15 minutes getting the "no disc" reading on his damned DVD player and having to eject and wipe clean the offending item before gingerly reinserting it, only to get the "error; unreadable" response all over again? I think not.

Then there's the artwork. Just as piddly CD "jewel boxes" (a breakable abomination) could never rival the sturdy majesty of a gatefold LP sleeve, so DVD covers lack the widescreen canvas of those proudly oversized plastic packages that once housed our video collections.

This is a particular bugbear for fans of the "video nasties", which were often most memorable for their spectacularly outré cover designs. Abel Ferrara's The Driller Killer may have been an arthouse affair that owed more to Warhol than to gore cinema, but its cover featured a man getting his head drilled off in glorious glowing colour while the tag-line screamed "The Blood Runs in Rivers!" (it didn't). Similarly, who could fail to love the image of a man hungrily feeding on his own intestines, which adorned the box for Anthrophagous? So beloved were these banned video covers that a book entitled The Art of the Nasty was published to great acclaim, reproducing the splendid vulgarity of VHS in the days when the director of public prosecutions had nothing better to do than hound harmless horror fans.

None of which is to suggest that DVD (and now Blu-ray) doesn't have its place. Films look better – and perhaps more importantly sound better – on disc, and the "modern" formats (themselves almost obsolete already) are clearly unbeatable in terms of storage space. My loft is stuffed to busting with bulky black plastic videos which would doubtless fit snugly on to a single shelf if transferred to slimline CD. In the flat where I used to live, you couldn't move without putting your foot through an un-rewound copy of Suspiria or jagging your shin on a suspicious-looking home-recorded tape furtively labelled "Nekromantik 2 – Uncut". The world of entertainment has moved on and the home is undoubtedly a better and a safer place for it. But I still can't bring myself to throw out those videotapes – and now, thanks to The House of the Devil, my loft just got a little more crammed.